ENVIRONMENTAL BOARD MEMBERS TOUR LANDFILL

Members of the Environmental Quality Control Board got a thorough tour of the Broward County landfill Wednesday, from the mountain of plowed-under rotten food to the valley of old tires.

The county board requested the tour so it could better monitor the closing of the landfill, scheduled for the end of 1987, Chairman George Fitzpatrick said. The dump is at Orange Drive and Southwest 142nd Avenue in western Davie.

"It's easier to regulate an organization or a process if you understand more about it," said Fitzpatrick, who spent the tour taking photographs and quizzing Jim Elias, Broward County's chief of solid waste management.

"I am the manager of a site that boasts probably the biggest collection of tires in the state of Florida," Elias told his guests as they surveyed an estimated 6 million tires.

The tires cushion the landfill's "trash disposal area," which every month accepts 80,000 cubic yards of old chairs, couches, tables, bicycles, lawnmowers and television sets, according to Elias.

Millions of pieces of trash are visible. Tons of garbage are not, having been plowed into an 87-foot, rock-covered mountain presided over by black buzzards and white water birds. It is the second highest spot in Broward County, behind a similar mountain at the northern landfill operated by Waste Management Inc. in Pompano Beach.

Every day, the southern landfill accepts 900 tons of garbage, mostly foodstuffs, Elias said. It is ground into the mountain that is now only three feet from its maximum height.

Directly to the west of this mountain, cattle graze on the dairy lands of Imagination Farms.

Complaints -- particularly about the odor -- have been made against the landfill for years, Fitzpatrick said. "But people who have been complaining in the past realize this site will be closed down in the future."

The county has an agreement with the town of Davie -- one of the noisest complainers -- to close the landfill by the end of 1987. It will be replaced by two incinerators the county plans to build by the end of the decade, plus an interim landfill to be located west of Pembroke Pines.